From Chambery to Milan

Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from anyoccasion that there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was atChambéry--but four hours from Geneva--that I accepted thesituation and decided there might be mysterious delights inentering Italy by a whizz through an eight-mile tunnel, even as abullet through the bore of a gun. I found my reward in theSavoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the smile ofanticipation. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at leastmore Italian than anything but Italy--more Italian, too, Ishould think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarmingred-legged soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire ofM. Thiers. The light and the complexion of things had to my eyesnot a little of that mollified depth last loved by them ratherfurther on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot andthe mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seennearer home than at Chambéry. But the vegetation, assuredly, hadan all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic waysidetangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the lineof careless grace. Chambéry as a town, however, constitutes noforetaste of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness andshabbiness, the fond critic of such things will tell you; andthat of the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I found abetter pastime, however, than strolling through the dark dullstreets in quest of effects that were not forthcoming. The firsturchin you meet will show you the way to Les Charmettes and theMaison Jean-Jacques. A very. pleasant way it becomes as soon asit leaves the town--a winding, climbing by-road, bordered withsuch a tall and sturdy hedge as to give it the air of an Englishlane--if you can fancy an English lane introducing you to thehaunts of a Madame de Warens.

The house that formerly sheltered this lady's singular ménagestands on a hillside above the road, which a rapid path connectswith the little grass-grown terrace before it. It is a smallshabby, homely dwelling, with a certain reputable solidity,however, and more of internal spaciousness than of outsidepromise. The place is shown by an elderly competent dame whopoints out the very few surviving objects which you may touchwith the reflection--complacent in whatsoever degree suits you--that they have known the familiarity of Rousseau's hand. It waspresumably a meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that onsuch scanty features so much expression should linger. But thestructure has an ancient ponderosity, and the dust of theeighteenth century seems to lie on its worm-eaten floors, tocling to the faded old papiers à ramages on the walls andto lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden ceilings. Madame deWarens's bed remains, with the narrow couch of Jean-Jacques aswell, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and abattered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with itsmaster's name--its primitive tick as extinct as his passionateheart-beats. It cost me, I confess, a somewhat pityingacceleration of my own to see this intimately personal relic ofthe genius loci--for it had dwelt; in his waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a material point in spacenearer to a man's consciousness--tossed so the dog's-earedvisitors' record or livre de cuisine recently denounced byMadame George Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far assome faint ghostly presence of its famous inmates seems to lingerthere, is by no means exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, ifnot of pure happiness, at least of prosperity and, honour, wealthand success. But Les Charmettes is haunted by ghosts unclean andforlorn. The place tells of poverty, perversity, distress. Agood deal of clever modern talent in France has been employed intouching up the episode of which it was the scene and trickingit out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charmingterrace I have mentioned--a little jewel of a terrace, withgrassy flags and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of greatswelling violet hills--stood there reminded how much sweeterNature is than man, the story looked rather wan and unlovelybeneath these literary decorations, and I could pay it nolivelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. Hero and heroinehave become too much creatures of history to take up attitudes aspart of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for atourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration,to be inserted mentally in the text of the "Confessions," aglimpse of Les Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes therare charm of good autobiography to behold with one's eyes thefaded and battered background of the story; and Rousseau'snarrative is so incomparably vivid and forcible that the sordidlittle house at Chambéry seems of a hardly deeper shade ofreality than so many other passages of his projected truth.

If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplesslywith the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the MontCenis Tunnel smells of the time to come. As I passed along theSaint-Gothard highway a couple of months since, I perceived, halfup the Swiss ascent, a group of navvies at work in a gorgebeneath the road. They had laid bare a broad surface of graniteand had punched in the centre of it a round black cavity, ofabout the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a soup-plate. Thiswas to attain its perfect development some eight years hence. TheMont Cenis may therefore be held to have set a fashion which willbe followed till the highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apexor snow-capped gable-tip of some resounding fuliginous corridor.The tunnel differs but in length from other tunnels; you spendhalf an hour in it. But you whirl out into the blest peninsula,and as you look back seem to see the mighty mass shrug itsshoulders over the line, the mere turn of a dreaming giant in hissleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic object, out there isno perfection without its beauty; and as you measure the longrugged outline of the pyramid of which it forms the base youaccept it as the perfection of a short cut. Twenty-four hoursfrom Paris to Turin is speed for the times--speed which maycontent us, at any rate, until expansive Berlin has succeeded inplacing itself at thirty-six from Milan.

To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find acity of arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes,of blue-legged officers, of ladies draped in the North-Italianmantilla. An old friend of Italy coming back to her finds an easywaking for dormant memories. Every object is a reminder and everyreminder a thrill. Half an hour after my arrival, as I stood atmy window, which overhung the great square, I found the scene,within and without, a rough epitome of every pleasure and everyimpression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the balcony andthe Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, thelavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divanframed for the noonday siesta, the massive medieval Castello inmid-piazza, with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladianfront, the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light,the range of colour, the suggestion of sound. Later, beneath thearcades, I found many an old acquaintance: beautiful officers,resplendent, slow-strolling, contemplative of female beauty;civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less gorgeous, with thatreligious faith in moustache and shirt-front which distinguishesthe belle jeunesse of Italy; ladies with heads artfullyshawled in Spanish-looking lace, but with too little art--or toomuch nature at least--in the region of the bodice; well-conditioned young abbati with neatly drawn stockings.These indeed are not objects of first-rate interest, and withsuch Turin is rather meagrely furnished. It has no architecture,no churches, no monuments, no romantic street-scenery. It has thegreat votive temple of the Superga, which stands on a highhilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and liftingits own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. Butwhen you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, askein of a few yellow threads in August, despite its frequenthabit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself thatin architecture position is half the battle, you have nothingleft to visit but the Museum of pictures. The Turin Gallery,which is large and well arranged, is the fortunate owner of threeor four masterpieces: a couple of magnificent Vandycks and acouple of Paul Veroneses; the latter a Queen of Sheba and a Feastof the House of Levi--the usual splendid combination of brocades,grandees and marble colonnades dividing those skies deturquoise malade to which Théophile Gautier is fond ofalluding. The Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect thetraveller feels at liberty to keep his best attention in reserve.If, however, he has the proper relish for Vandyck, let him lingerlong and fondly here; for that admiration will never be morepotently stirred than by the adorable group of the three littleroyal highnesses, sons and the daughter of Charles I. All thepurity of childhood is here, and all its soft solidity ofstructure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin andcontrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Cladrespectively in crimson, white and blue, these small scions standup in their ruffs and fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaringtheir infantine stomachers at the spectator with an innocence, adignity, a delightful grotesqueness, which make the picture athing of close truth as well as of fine decorum. You might kisstheir hands, but you certainly would think twice before pinchingtheir cheeks--provocative as they are of this tribute ofadmiration--and would altogether lack presumption to lift themoff the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand sosturdily planted by right of birth. There is something inimitablein the paternal gallantry with which the painter has touched offthe young lady. She was a princess, yet she was a baby, and hehas contrived, we let ourselves fancy, to interweave anintimation that she was a creature whom, in her teens, thelucklessly smitten--even as he was prematurely--must vainly sighfor. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its meritsunder this head may be emulated, at a distance; the lovelymodulations of colour in the three contrasted and harmonisedlittle satin petticoats, the solidity of the little heads, inspite of all their prettiness, the happy, unexaggeratedsquareness and maturity of pose, are, severally, points tostudy, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste ofsuch a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its greatmerit--a taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind.Go and enjoy this supreme expression of Vandyck's fine sense, andadmit that never was a politer production.

Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin isinnocent, but in its general aspect still lingers a northernreserve which makes the place rather perhaps the last of theprose capitals than the first of the poetic. The long Austrianoccupation perhaps did something to Germanise its physiognomy;though indeed this is an indifferent explanation when oneremembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy held her ownin Venetia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with theæsthetic impulse, opens to us frankly enough the thick volume ofher past. Of that volume the Cathedral is the fairest and fullestpage--a structure not supremely interesting, not logical, noteven, to some minds, commandingly beautiful, but grandly curiousand superbly rich. I hope, for my own part, never to grow tooparticular to admire it. If it had no other distinction it wouldstill have that of impressive, immeasurable achievement. As Istrolled beside its vast indented base one evening, and felt it,above me, rear its grey mysteries into the starlight while therestless human tide on which I floated rose no higher than thefirst few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted tobelieve that beauty in great architecture is almost a secondarymerit, and that the main point is mass--such mass as may make ita supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in this way agreat building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More thanany other it represents difficulties mastered, resourcescombined, labour, courage and patience. And there are people whotell us that art has nothing to do with morality! Little enough,doubtless, when it is concerned, even ever so little, in paintingthe roof of Milan Cathedral within to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has heard--how good it is,how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent an artifice. Itis the first thing your cicerone shows you on entering thechurch. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept itphilosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirablyeffective as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, ofpitch. It is splendidly vast and dim; the altarlamps twinkle afarthrough the incense-thickened air like foglights at sea, and thegreat columns rise straight to the roof, which hardly curves tomeet them, with the girth and altitude of oaks of a thousandyears; but there is little refinement of design--few of thosefelicities of proportion which the eye caresses, when it findsthem, very much as the memory retains and repeats some happylines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Consistentlybrave, none the less, is the result produced, and nothing braverthan a certain exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relicsof St. Charles Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eternal restin a small but gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundlesspavement and before the high altar; and for the modest sum offive francs you may have his shrivelled mortality unveiled andgaze at it with whatever reserves occur to you. The CatholicChurch never renounces a chance of the sublime for fear of achance of the ridiculous--especially when the chance of thesublime may be the very excellent chance of five francs. Theperformance in question, of which the good San Carlo paid in thefirst instance the cost, was impressive certainly, but as amonstrous matter or a grim comedy may still be. The littlesacristan, having secured his audience, whipped on a white tunicover his frock, lighted a couple of extra candles and proceededto remove from above the altar, by means of a crank, a sort ofsliding shutter, just as you may see a shop-boy do of a morningat his master's window. In this case too a large sheet of plate-glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the étalageyou must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, hasstruck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The blackmummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin,clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved,glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture ofdeath and life; the desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideouslittle black mask and skull, and the living, glowing, twinklingsplendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. The collection isreally fine, and many great historic names are attached to thedifferent offerings. Whatever may be the better opinion as to thefuture of the Church, I can't help thinking she will make afigure in the world so long as she retains this great fund ofprecious "properties," this prodigious capital decorativelyinvested and scintillating throughout Christendom at effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, inspite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of thesacristan, that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation,or at least made irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire tobreathe a sweeter air that I immediately afterwards undertook theinterminable climb to the roof of the cathedral. This is anotherworld of wonders, and one which enjoys due renown, every squareinch of wall on the winding stairways being bescribbled with atraveller's name. There is a great glare from the far-stretchingslopes of marble, a confusion (like the masts of a navy or thespears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting theimpalpable blue, and, better than either, the goodliest view oflevel Lombardy sleeping in its rich transalpine light andresembling, with its white-walled dwellings and the spires on itshorizon, a vast green sea spotted with ships. After two months ofSwitzerland the Lombard plain is a rich rest to the eye, and theyellow, liquid, free-flowing light--as if on favoured Italy thevessels of heaven were more widely opened--had for mine a charmwhich made me think of a great opaque mountain as a blasphemousinvasion of the atmospheric spaces.

[Illustration: THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN]

I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure ofMilan at the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo.The cathedral is good for another thousand years, but we askwhether our children will find in the most majestic and mostluckless of frescoes much more than the shadow of a shadow. Itsfame has been for a century or two that, as one may say, of anillustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, withleave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions.The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be thesaddest work of art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruinedas it is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compareits anguish of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a humanorganism. The production of the prodigy was a breath from theinfinite, and the painter's conception not immeasurably lesscomplex than the scheme, say, of his own mortal constitution.There has been much talk lately of the irony of fate, but Isuspect fate was never more ironical than when she led the mostscientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend fifteenlong years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet,after all, may not the playing of that trick represent but adeeper wisdom, since if the thing enjoyed the immortal health andbloom of a first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the mostpertinent lessons in the history of art? We know it as hearsay,but here is the plain proof, that there is no limit to the amountof "stuff" an artist may put into his work. Every painter oughtonce in his life to stand before the Cenacolo and decipher itsmoral. Mix with your colours and mess on your palette everyparticle of the very substance of your soul, and this lestperchance your "prepared surface" shall play you a trick! Then,and then only, it will fight to the last--it will resist even indeath. Raphael was a happier genius; you look at his lovely"Marriage of the Virgin" at the Brera, beautiful as some firstdeep smile of conscious inspiration, but to feel that he foresawno complaint against fate, and that he knew the world he wantedto know and charmed it into never giving him away. But I haveleft no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise ofbook-worms with an eye for their background--if such creaturesexist--the Ambrosian Library; nor of that mighty basilica of St.Ambrose, with its spacious atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics,in which it is surely your own fault if you don't forget Dr.Strauss and M. Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of theninth century.

It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that,unlike those fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Splügenand--yet awhile longer--the Saint-Gothard, it denies you aglimpse of that paradise adorned by the four lakes even as thatof uncommented Scripture by the rivers of Eden. I made, however,an excursion to the Lake of Como, which, though brief, lastedlong enough to suggest to me that I too was a hero of romancewith leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying tourist with aBradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured largely innovels of "immoral" tendency--being commonly the spot to whichinflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen tofly with them and ignore the restrictions of public opinion. Buteven the Lake of Como has been revised and improved; the fondestprejudices yield to time; it gives one somehow a sense of anaspiringly high tone. I should pay a poor compliment at least tothe swarming inmates of the hotels which now alternateattractively by the water-side with villas old and new were I toread the appearances more cynically. But if it is lost to floridfiction it still presents its blue bosom to most other refineduses, and the unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, maydo any amount of private romancing there. The pretty hotel atCadenabbia offers him, for instance, in the most elegant andassured form, the so often precarious adventure of what he callsat home summer board. It is all so unreal, so fictitious, soelegant and idle, so framed to undermine a rigid sense of thechief end of man not being to float for ever in an ornamentalboat, beneath an awning tasselled like a circus-horse, impelledby an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one stately stretch oflake-laved villa steps to another, that departure seems as harshand unnatural as the dream-dispelling note of some punctual voiceat your bedside on a dusky winter morning. Yet I wondered, for myown part, where I had seen it all before--the pink-walled villasgleaming through their shrubberies of orange and oleander, themountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many breasts ofdoves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian voice.Where indeed but at the Opera when the manager has been more thanusually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was thepalace of the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hallopening as freely on the stage as a railway buffet on theplatform; beyond, the delightful back scene, with its operaticgamut of colouring; in the middle the scarlet-sashedbarcaiuoli, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, awaitingthe conductor's signal. It was better even than being in a novel--this being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto.